one out of nearly three hundred votes threw out the Bill for the repeal of the Paper Duties, and asserted in no mincing fashion the privileges of the Peerage. Everybody expected that the Government would receive a decisive check on the subject of their finance from the Upper House, but certainly no one could anticipate that they would find themselves in such a miserable minority. When it was first announced, indeed, that the House of Lords was likely to oppose the abolition of the Paper Duties, great was the fluttering among the penny demagogues, and so firmly did they imagine that what was all-important to the proprietors of a few strawpaper journals was all-important to the people of England, that they hoped to be able to get up an agitation sufficient to intimidate Lord Derby and the whole of the aristocracy. A very large meeting was held in St Martin's Hall. Large meetings can be held anywhere if a great gun is in position on the platform, and promises to go off with a mighty detonation. It is well known that on a platform Mr Bright is the greatest of all guns. Where there is nobody to contradict him, who can speak more loudly than he? In any large city there are thousands who would be glad to hear the successful orator, even though they have not one spark of sympathy with his peculiar ideas. It is not wonderful that in London, where he does not often speak to popular audiences, he should collect a great crowd. It was equally natural that the penny papers should repre sent that crowd as a demonstration against the iniquity which the House of Lords was about to perpetrate. Numberless were the speeches and articles and threats thrown out by a small but energetic band who saw the prize slipping from their grasp. The abolition of the Paper Duties is their life-it is all the world to them. They were frantic; and not content to agitate for the repeal, they turned their agitation into an insult to the House of Lords. The effect of that .insult is pretty evident in the vote to which we have just referred. The Duke of Argyle commenced his speech by saying that the question of privilege was so dangerous, that to his

certain knowledge many noble peers who were opposed to the financial measures of Mr Gladstone, and would have voted against them in the House of Commons, meant, on constitutional grounds, and in the interest of the House of Lords, to give their suf frage to the Government. The direct converse of this might have been stated in still stronger terms on the opposite side of the House. Many peers who would have been neutral, and would have abstained from any vote likely to embarrass the Cabinet, felt constrained to come to the rescue of the House of Lords, and assert its rights once for all. The attempt at intimidation, therefore, instead of accomplishing what was intended, accomplished the very opposite, and combined such a majority against the Government as will carry immense weight throughout the country, and be accepted as a significant censure of Mr Gladstone's gambling and revolutionary finance.

The debate raised great expectations in the metropolis, and it was currently stated that not since the discussion on the second reading of the bill to repeal the Corn Laws was there so much excitement in the House of Lords. We should rather say about the House of Lords, for our hereditary legislators take everything quietly, and they did not appear in great force until they had done proper justice to the dinnertable. But all about the House-in the galleries, in the passages, on the steps of the throne, and in those wonderful niches and corners, including the royal box, where people are stowed away it is difficult to say how there were immense crowds in a state of pleasant excitement. Ladies were rustling to their places, thanking their cavaliers, compressing their crinoline into the narrowest compass, and then taking aim at everybody with their opera-glasses. Members of the House of Commons were dashing in wildly wherever there was a chance of finding rest for the sole of the foot. Sharp at five o'clock there was a rush into the strangers' gallery as into the pit of the Adelphi Theatre for the front seats, and there was a wild clatter of questions and answers, all referring to who is who.

From the reporters' gallery, immediately below, the men looked down with a more jaded sensation at a scene that was not entirely new to them, and that was likely to afford them more labour than pleasure. To complete the picture, one saw flitting to and fro-out and in ubiquitous through doors and passages, the Mother Carey's chickens of the brewing storm-members of the House of Commons who are interested in penny papers. These unquiet spirits were rushing about with great bundles of most formidable documents in their hands, trying to catch some noble lord, and to buckle him to his work. As the debate proceeded, Mr Disraeli or Mr Whiteside would drop in to see how all was going, would take a quiet survey of the House, and then depart to other duties.

The debate, unfortunately for those who assembled in such numbers, was not an interesting one. The issues at stake were tremendous; but the discussions which these issues raised, turned on questions of precedent and of statistics which were not adapted for oratorical display. In addition to which, when the arguments are all on one side, when there is nothing to combat, and when speaker after speaker has simply to reiterate what has been already said, a debate is apt to become tedious. On the Government side there were five speakers, Lords Granville, Dufferin, Clanricarde, Cranworth, and the Duke of Argyle; but they had absolutely nothing to say. Lord Granville declared that the Paper Duty was a very bad tax, that the Government could not have foreseen the Chinese war, and that very often, when a balance-sheet appears to be deficient in the middle of the financial year, it is found to yield a surplus at the end. Lord Dufferin, who, in defence of a hopeless cause, spoke with a command of language and of illustration worthy of his literary reputation, stated that, in presuming to differ with Lord Lyndhurst, he was David going out against Goliath with this difference, however, that he had no divine mission. Lord Clanricarde declared that he did not consider the state of our finances en

couraging (thus admitting the wha case against the Government), be that nevertheless he would vote for the repeal of the Paper Duties, became the decision of the House of Commons had led a good many people into commercial engagements wh it would be extremely inconvenient for them to keep. Lord Cran worth admitted that the coure which the House of Peers proposed to take might be constitutional, bu still argued that it was so thinly separated from what seemed to be unconstitutional, that to many minds the difference would be unintelligible The Duke of Argyle maintained that the Government had very good in tentions; and that if the effect of their finance was revolutionary, they did not mean it to be so. Turning to the constitutional question, he made that wonderful statement, with regard to money bills and supply bills. in which he cut his own throat as neatly as ever speaker did. He objected to the precedents adduced by Lord Lyndhurst, that they all referred to money bills, and not to sup ply bills. It is amazing what argi ments some people will put forward when they have nothing to say. A hungry man has been known to eat his own fingers; and the Duke of Argyle was in a state of the most abject want when he was reduced to such a reply. The facts are, first, that Lord Lyndhurst had really quoted a precedent relating to a supply bill: and, secondly, that the Bill for the repeal of the Paper Duties is not a supply bill. The Duke admitted that the arguments of Lord Lyndhurst might have some validity as referring to money bills, but that they had none as referring to supply. Lord Derby, in the gentlest way, pointed out the fact that this bill referred not to supply, but was a money bill of the ordinary class.

The speaking on the side of Opposition was much better and more convincing. Here, also, the speakers were five-Lords Lyudhurst, Monteagle, Chelmsford, the Duke of Rutland, and the Earl of Derby. Lord Lyndhurst's speech was the wonderful effort of an old man, who had that day completed his eighty-eighth year; but apart from this source

of interest, it was a perfectly clear and unanswerable statement of the rights appertaining to the House of Lords. He spoke for fifty minutes, . in a clear voice, that was distinctly :heard in a house which, notwithstanding its beauties, does not possess the . first of all requisites, that of being I well adapted for sound. And then it devolved on Lord Monteagle to make his motion, that the second reading of the Bill for the repeal of the Paper Duties be postponed to that day six months. The noble lord is not a brilliant speaker; and as he rose, at about a quarter to eight, he had to contend for an audience with the counter-claims of dinner and tea. The bishops and the ladies went off to indulge in tea, while the greater portion of the male sex were intent on more substantial fare. Lord Monteagle got on slowly enough with a cold and thin audience. Apparently, also, his speech acted with soporific effect on the reporters, for they have condensed and toned it down. Whig as he is, he said some wonderfully kind things of the Government and their financial measure, which would have appeared very pretty in print. For example, in referring to the new sources of revenue out of which the Chancellor of the Exchequer contrived to juggle a surplus-such as the Spanish debt and the malt and hop credits he stated that this "revenue was raised on a rotten foundation, discreditable to all the parties concerned." He also described the national balance-sheet prepared by Mr Gladstone as "worthy of an insolvent passing through the Bankruptcy Court, and wishing to appear richer than he really is." Lord Monteagle's office, that of Comptrollor of the Exchequer, has been described in the leading journal as the pivot of the constitution. A pivot is generally a very hard and impenetrable substance-sometimes a precious jewel. It might be scarcely wise in us to represent Lord Monteagle as a brilliant and precious gem of the British constitution, but we are at liberty to speak of him and his speech as made of hard and impenetrable stuff. If his matter was dull, it was incontestable; if his statement was prosy, it

was nevertheless irresistible. And no speaker that followed so much as attempted to show how we could possibly avoid a deficit either in the current or in the ensuing year.

The speech of the evening was Lord Derby's, and the criticism of Mr Gladstone's finance came with more force from him than from either Lord Monteagle in the House of Lords, or from Mr Disraeli in the House of Commons. People distrust the criticisms of rival financiers. When Sir Francis Baring chose to condemn the Chancellor of the Exchequer's propositions, he was reminded somewhat insolently by Mr Bright that his own budgets were not particularly happy, and that the Whigs had never produced a financier. There is a distrust of figures, and we all know that, by a skilful shuffling of statistics, an adroit arithmetician can prove anything he pleases, to the bewilderment of an audience that forgets the first row of figures long before the speaker comes to the enunciation of the second. We at once trust and distrust the statistics of the professed financier. But Lord Derby, so far from being a professed financier, was twitted by Lord Granville for his dislike of arithmetic. There were also private whispers among those who wished the Tory chief no good, that he always failed in marshalling figures, and that his speech, when it came to the statistical part, would be a perfect jumble of impossible and contradictory entries. Unluckily for the prophets of ill, the speech was as clear as crystal, and Lord Derby proved that he could, when he chose to take the trouble, make a financial statement unsurpassable in lucidity and accuracy. But the speech was more than lucid-it was a terrible exposure. Even Lord Derby's enemies will allow that there is nobody in Parliament who can equal him in critical acumen. He is the most masterly critic that we have; and when he comes to expose all the weak points of a Minister or a measure, nothing can stand before his ruthless analysis. Mr Gladstone's finance was exposed on the night of the 21st of May last to a trial of this sort, and it is needless to sat as

Lord Derby weighed it in his balance, there was written in many an eye throughout the House the Mene, Mene of the Chancellor's fame. He took Mr Gladstone's own figures. He did not dispute the calculations on which they were based. Accepting the premises, he showed the mighty gulf of a deficit, on the brink of which, according to the Chancellor's own showing, we are now standing. One part of this exposition was especially effective namely, that in which he wound up what he had to say of the deficit, by denouncing the schemes of a man who at tempted to get the country out of a financial embarrassment by throwing "double or quits." A period of financial difficulty, says Mr Gladstone, is the period for the country to make experiments which may retrieve all deficiencies. If the experiments succeed, so much the better; if they fail, we shall not be much worse off than before. "My lords," said Lord Derby, "I say that is not the policy of a statesman-it is the policy of a desperate and improvident gambler." There was a Chancellor of the Exchequer who, on account of his wonderfully prosperous budgets in a period of great national suffering, was named by William Cobbett, Mr Prosperity Robinson. Mr Gladstone is the legitimate successor of that gentleman, and it will not be soon forgotten that he was described by Lord Derby as a desperate and improvident gambler. No description could be more true, and the name will stick.

The most important part of Lord Derby's speech, however, was not that which exposed the improvidence and gambling of which Mr Gladstone had been guilty. The failure of all the financial measures of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the desperate character of his Budget, had been fully exhibited by Mr Disraeli, and Mr Disraeli's criticism had been followed by the attacks of many more who were thoroughly disgusted with charlatanry in finance. Lord Derby had another and perhaps a more important task to fulfil. He not merely put the Budget in the fire-he put Mr Gladstone himself into the same

furnace. He showed Mr Gladstone's contradictions. He set speech against speech, proposal against proposal, and showed Mr Gladstone contradicting himself in the most barefaced way whenever it suited his purpose. Everybody knows how very solemn, how very earnest Mr Gladstone can be; how greatly his influence with the House of Commons depends on the belief that here is a man raised by moral feeling high above all party considerations, to whom honour is above all price, to whom truth and candour are infinitely more than any personal gratification. Other men are but mortals-they have personal ambition and party feeling to gratify, and well may he lecture them, as he does, for not being as he is-above suspicion. If, as Mr Disraeli says, Mr Gladstone has been more fortunate than the bottle conjuror in having enjoyed an enviable celebrity of seven years, on the faith of promises which he was unable to perform, he has enjoyed a much longer period of influence in the House of Commons on the strength of certain scruples of conscience which he was supposed to possess. He was such a good man, with such a wonderfully tender conscience about little things, that everybody imagined he must be equally tender on great occasions, and a most safe guide in any question which we should wish to decide with perfect candour and freedom from party considerations. Now, let no one misunderstand us. We are very far from saying that Mr Gladstone is not a conscientious man. We are very far from supposing that he would do what he believes to be wrong. But what is conscience? Is it not under the dominion of reason; and is not reason exceedingly fallible Mr Gladstone follows his conscience; but his conscience is that of a casu ist. People speak of him as Jesuitical. They mean precisely what we mean, when we describe him as casuistical His is a conscience which no doubt may form its decisions with perfect honesty, but which plain and straightforward men will always be unwilling to regard as a safe guide. It is an elastic conscience that, as Lord Derby showed, permits of his saying one thing at one time, and contradicting

it at a more convenient season. It would be vain for us to quote the instances recorded by Lord Derby. One instance is nothing; it might be an accident. It is the united sum of an immense variety of cases in which Mr Gladstone has shifted his sails to catch the popular breeze that brings conviction home. Let Lord Derby's speech be studied. The latter part of it was almost entirely made up of quotations. He stated his facts, and left his audience to draw the inference. That inference we have drawn, and it is, that granting Mr Gladstone to be an honourable man, his conscience, which we have always understood to be very tender, is not quite consistent in the conclusions it sanctions; and that for the future the member for Oxford University might, with advantage, moderate his tone, and address the House of Commons less as an angel, and more as a man of the world.

The result of the debate, however, is the chief thing. It is the latest triumph of the Conservative policy

in the present session, and it will revive the hopes of a party that at the commencement of the year seemed to be greatly discouraged. The adverse vote in the House of Lords has, of course, put the drag on Mr Gladstone, and for the future he will have to trot down the hill a little more gingerly. In the mean time, not knowing what a day may bring forth, we can only express our hope, that as Lord Derby is unwilling for the present to take office, and as it might even be unadvisable, in present complications, to disturb the existing Ministry, they will, now that they have got their gambling Chancellor pulled up, think a little more of the nation and less of a class; legislate, if they please, for Manchester, but for Manchester as a part of England. Let us also hope that the revival of a Conservative policy has saved this year from the undesirable pre-eminence which it had every prospect of attaining, to use the phrase of Lord Granville, as the year of immortal smash."

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